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Monday, November 12, 2012

The Tin Drum (November 13th at the Capitol Theatre)

[THE TIN DRUM screens Tuesday November
13th at 7 pm at the Capitol Theatre in association with The
Cleveland Cinematheque.)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Maybe if I had studied German instead
of French in high school or something, then my life would have taken
a very different turn, and right now my lovely bride Heidi Klum and
myself would be toasting long left-behind Cleveland, with our
neighbor Lebron James at the Victoria's Secret After-Party in Miami.
It's a nice thought. But no, I went with French. At least I finally
read The Three Musketeers in the original (took a number of
years), which got me insider moxie on any one of the numerous movie
adaptations. But, probably because I did not take German, I also lost
out, most likely, on reading the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum,
which I am given to understand is Most Important. Okay, whatever. I
finally got through the Twilight trilogy and so the literary
part of the brain is still a bit numb.

What I am getting at here, in
circumbendibus fashion, is that with my general avoidance of Teutonic
culture I also put off seeing world-cinema classic THE TIN DRUM
until just now, with a Director's Cut re-release of Volker
Schlondorf's 1979 multiple award-winner (Best Foreign-Language
Feature Oscar, among others). Whether it does justice to the Grass
novel I cannot fully say, but as sheer cinema it is an incredible
achievement, a Goya-esque pageant of the horrors and absurdities of
20th-century German culture, especially the little thing called
Nazism.

The setting is Danzig, an industrial
city divided between German and Polish influences following the First
World War. Oscar is born to a multicultural menage-a-trois between
proud German Matzerath, proud Pole Bronski, and a mother descended
from an obscure third minority, the Kashubians. At age 3, at his
birthday party, Oscar gets a tin drum as a present, and, as he senses
the idiocy, lust and injustice of the adult world all around him, he
simply decides to stop growing (he also discovers he can shatter
glass when he screams, a superpower that surfaces now and then but
never has real consequence).

Oscar remains physically a
three-year-old (Schlondorf found a remarkable young actor named
David Bennent, afflicted with a growth disorder that left him
undersized) but goes through school (teaching himself Goethe) and
puberty, and even playing his part, so to speak, in World War Two,
in a USO-like troupe of dwarf entertainers - it is another one of
Oskar's affectations that throughout life he carries and perpetually
plays a toy tin drum, or, more accurately, a succession of tin drums
obtained from the kindly local Jewish shopkeeper (French
singing/acting star Charles Aznavour). In the meantime, with the
tumultuous passage of years and the rise of Hitler, Oskar loses his
three parental figures one by one, to suicide and to war violence.
Bronski falls in with a short-lived Polish Resistance group while
shopkeeper Matzerath becomes an utterly bland and bourgeois Nazi
Party member.

I remember my college film-society
cohorts back in the early 1980s being quite taken with this film, and
I didn't know why (perhaps they were all German majors), as modern
Europeon history, unless it involved Lucio Fulci, seemed slightly out
of step with their aesthetic leanings towards ALIEN and DAWN
OF THE DEAD. Having finally seen THE TIN DRUM, though, I more
understand. Apart from the history-as-circus-freak-show elemental
vibe, there is some seriously sicko imagery here, including eels
extracted from a horse's severed head and the pocket-sized Oskar
having some sort of a weird first-love ritual with [SPOILER ALERT, I
GUESS] his father's blonde nymphet of a second wife, during which
they make a sort of a fizzy candy-slime out of their own saliva and a
popular chemical concoction and lick it off each other.

No wonder the Germans seem to lead the
world in abnormal-psychology studies. If Hollywood remade THE TIN
DRUM in an "Americanized" adaptation, in English (a
real Day of the Locust proposition, but I could see them doing
it, perhaps with young Macaulay Culkin as Oskar), the best director
to do the job would be David Lynch. (4 out of 4 stars)